text:
There's more to implants than meets the eye
In this month's Physics World, Richard Taylor, professor of physics, psychology and art at the University of Oregon, warns that artificial retinal implants – a technology fast becoming a reality – must adapt to the unique features of the human eye in order to become an effective treatment.
The gap between digital camera technology and the human eye is getting ever smaller, in terms of both the number of light-sensitive detectors and the space that they occupy. A human retina typically contains 127 million photoreceptors spread over an area of 1100 mm2. In comparison, today's state-of-the-art CMOS sensors feature 16.6 million photoreceptors over an area of 1600 mm2.
Despite the impressive progress of camera technology, several differences still remain, which is why, Taylor states, camera technology cannot simply be incorporated into the eye to restore the vision of patients with damaged rods and cones.
Taylor highlights that the eye tends to see what is directly in front of it – as the majority of its seven million cones are concentrated centrally – and less so on the periphery, whereas a camera captures everything in uniform detail with its pixels spread evenly across its entire field of view.
As such, the eye has to continually scan small areas to ensure that the image of interest falls mainly on the fovea – a pin-sized region positioned directly behind the lens that is crucial when visualizing detail. This is because the human eye exploits fractal patterns – geometric shapes that are present throughout nature and repeat themselves down to the smallest scale. If the eye employed the uniform distribution of photoreceptors found in cameras, there would simply be too much information for the brain to process in real time.
Furthermore, Taylor states how certain natural fractal patterns such as clouds, trees and rivers are more aesthetically pleasing and can greatly reduce stress. This stress-reduction process would not occur with a camera-based implant as movement in the eye would become unnecessary, eventually leading to the eye learning not to move and therefore not activating the relevant areas of the brain to relieve stress.
As Taylor writes, "Remarkably, implants based purely on camera designs might allow blind people to see, but they might only see a world devoid of stress-reducing beauty. This flaw emphasizes the subtleties of the human visual system and the potential downfalls of adopting, rather than adapting, camera technology for eye."
In addition to the problem of photoreceptor distribution, Taylor also highlights the problem of connecting an implant's electrodes to retinal neurons, which are fractal in structure and tend to stay intact even if the eye's rods and cones themselves are damaged by disease. A solution to this, developed by Taylor and his colleagues, is nanocluster deposition.
This involves the delivery, through an inert gas, of nanoclusters of materials onto the photodiodes of an implant. These clusters then self-assemble into the required fractal shape and enhance the connection between retinal implants and healthy neurons while at the same time allowing light to pass through onto the photodiode.
Provided by Institute of Physics


text:
- From: Keke Chen <email@example.com>
- Date: Sun, 08 Jun 2008 10:48:07 -0700
- CC: 'Zahir Tari' <firstname.lastname@example.com>
******* OTM 2008 Federated Conferences - Call For Papers ******* Monterry (Mexico), November 9 - 14, 2008 http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/fedconf/ NEW DEADLINES - Abstract: June 15 - Paper submission: June 22 BRIEF OVERVIEW "OnTheMove (OTM) to Meaningful Internet Systems and Ubiquitous Computing" co-locates five successful related and complementary conferences: - International Symposium on Distributed Objects and Applications (DOA'08) - International Conference on Ontologies, Databases and Applications of Semantics (ODBASE'08) - International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS'08) - International Symposium on Grid computing, high-performAnce and Distributed Applications (GADA'08) - International Symposium on Information Security (IS'08) Each conference covers multiple research vectors, viz. theory (e.g. underlying formalisms), conceptual (e.g. technical designs and conceptual solutions) and applications (e.g. case studies and industrial best practices). All five conferences share the scientific study of the distributed, conceptual and ubiquitous aspects of modern computing systems, and share the resulting application-pull created by the WWW. PAPER SUBMISSION SITE http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/fedconf/index.html?page=submit IMPORTANT DEADLINES: - Abstract submission: June 15, 2008 - Paper submission: June 22, 2008 - Acceptance notification: August 10, 2008 - Camera ready: August 25, 2008 - Registration: August 25, 2008 - OTM Conferences: November 9 - 14, 2008 PROGRAM COMMITTEE CHAIRS CoopIS PC Co-Chairs (email@example.com) * Johann Eder, University of Klagenfurt, Austria * Masaru Kitsuregawa, University of Tokyo, Japan * Ling Liu, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA DOA PC Co-Chairs (firstname.lastname@example.com) * Mark Little, Red Hat, UK * Alberto Montresor, University of Trento, Italy * Greg Pavlik, Oracle, USA ODBASE PC Co-Chairs (email@example.com) * Malu Castellanos, HP, USA * Fausto Giunchiglia, University of Trento, Italy * Feng Ling, Tsinghua University, China GADA PC Co-Chairs (firstname.lastname@example.com) * Dennis Gannon, Indiana University, USA * Pilar Herrero, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain * Daniel S. Katz, Louisiana State University, USA * María S. Pérez, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain IS PC Co-Chairs (firstname.lastname@example.com) * Jong Hyuk Park, Kyungnam University, Korea * Bart Preneel, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium * Ravi Sandhu, University of Texas, USA * André Zúquete, University of Aveiro, Portugal
Received on Sunday, 8 June 2008 17:49:01 UTC

subset: commoncrawl


text:
I Dare You to Fail - Make $100 over and over again
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I have a question for you: Are you religious? Please raise your hand right now if you think of yourself as a religious person. Let's see, I'd say about three or four percent. I had no idea there were so many believers at a TED Conference. (Laughter) Okay, here's another question: Do you think of yourself as spiritual in any way, shape or form? Raise your hand. Okay, that's the majority. My Talk today is about the main reason, or one of the main reasons, why most people consider themselves to be spiritual in some way, shape or form.My Talk today is about self-transcendence. It's just a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away. And when that happens, the feeling is ecstatic and we reach for metaphors of up and down to explain these feelings. We talk about being uplifted or elevated. Now it's really hard to think about anything abstract like this without a good concrete metaphor. So here's the metaphor I'm offering today. Think about the mind as being like a house with many rooms, most of which we're very familiar with. But sometimes it's as though a doorway appears from out of nowhere and it opens onto a staircase. We climb the staircase and experience a state of altered consciousness. In 1902, the great American psychologist William James wrote about the many varieties of religious experience. He collected all kinds of case studies. He quoted the words of all kinds of people who'd had a variety of these experiences. One of the most exciting to me is this young man, Stephen Bradley, had an encounter, he thought, with Jesus in 1820. And here's what Bradley said about it.(Music) (Video) Stephen Bradley: I thought I saw the savior in human shape for about one second in the room, with arms extended, appearing to say to me, "Come." The next day I rejoiced with trembling. My happiness was so great that I said I wanted to die. This world had no place in my affections. Previous to this time, I was very selfish and self-righteous. But now I desired the welfare of all mankind and could, with a feeling heart, forgive my worst enemies. JH: So note how Bradley's petty, moralistic self just dies on the way up the staircase.And on this higher level he becomes loving and forgiving. The world's many religions have found so many ways to help people climb the staircase. Some shut down the self using meditation. Others use psychedelic drugs. This is from a 16th century Aztec scroll showing a man about to eat a psilocybin mushroom and at the same moment get yanked up the staircase by a god. Others use dancing, spinning and circling to promote self-transcendence. But you don't need a religion to get you through the staircase. Lots of people find self-transcendence in nature. Others overcome their self at raves. But here's the weirdest place of all: war. So many books about war say the same thing, that nothing brings people together like war. And that bringing them together opens up the possibility of extraordinary self-transcendent experiences. I'm going to play for you an excerpt from this book by Glenn Gray.Gray was a soldier in the American army in World War II. And after the war he interviewed a lot of other soldiers and wrote about the experience of men in battle. Here's a key passage where he basically describes the staircase. (Video) Glenn Gray: Many veterans will admit that the experience of communal effort in battle has been the high point of their lives. "I" passes insensibly into a "we," "my" becomes "our" and individual faith loses its central importance. I believe that it is nothing less than the assurance of immortality that makes self-sacrifice at these moments so relatively easy. I may fall, but I do not die, for that which is real in me goes forward and lives on in the comrades for whom I gave up my life. JH: So what all of these cases have in common is that the self seems to thin out, or melt away, and it feels good, it feels really good, in a way totally unlike anything we feel in our normal lives.It feels somehow uplifting. This idea that we move up was central in the writing of the great French sociologist Emile Durkheim. Durkheim even called us Homo duplex, or two-level man. The lower level he called the level of the profane. Now profane is the opposite of sacred. It just means ordinary or common. And in our ordinary lives we exist as individuals. We want to satisfy our individual desires. We pursue our individual goals. But sometimes something happens that triggers a phase change. Individuals unite into a team, a movement or a nation, which is far more than the sum of its parts. Durkheim called this level the level of the sacred because he believed that the function of religion was to unite people into a group, into a moral community. Durkheim believed that anything that unites us takes on an air of sacredness. And once people circle around some sacred object or value, they'll then work as a team and fight to defend it. Durkheim wrote about a set of intense collective emotions that accomplish this miracle of E pluribus unum, of making a group out of individuals.Think of the collective joy in Britain on the day World War II ended. Think of the collective anger in Tahrir Square, which brought down a dictator. And think of the collective grief in the United States that we all felt, that brought us all together, after 9/11. So let me summarize where we are. I'm saying that the capacity for self-transcendence is just a basic part of being human. I'm offering the metaphor of a staircase in the mind. I'm saying we are Homo duplex and this staircase takes us up from the profane level to the level of the sacred. When we climb that staircase, self-interest fades away, we become just much less self-interested, and we feel as though we are better, nobler and somehow uplifted. So here's the million-dollar question for social scientists like me: Is the staircase a feature of our evolutionary design? Is it a product of natural selection, like our hands? Or is it a bug, a mistake in the system — this religious stuff is just something that happens when the wires cross in the brain — Jill has a stroke and she has this religious experience, it's just a mistake? Well many scientists who study religion take this view.The New Atheists, for example, argue that religion is a set of memes, sort of parasitic memes, that get inside our minds and make us do all kinds of crazy religious stuff, self-destructive stuff, like suicide bombing. And after all, how could it ever be good for us to lose ourselves? How could it ever be adaptive for any organism to overcome self-interest? Well let me show you. In "The Descent of Man," Charles Darwin wrote a great deal about the evolution of morality — where did it come from, why do we have it.Darwin noted that many of our virtues are of very little use to ourselves, but they're of great use to our groups. He wrote about the scenario in which two tribes of early humans would have come in contact and competition. He said, "If the one tribe included a great number of courageous, sympathetic and faithful members who are always ready to aid and defend each other, this tribe would succeed better and conquer the other." He went on to say that "Selfish and contentious people will not cohere, and without coherence nothing can be effected." In other words, Charles Darwin believed in group selection.Now this idea has been very controversial for the last 40 years, but it's about to make a major comeback this year, especially after E.O. Wilson's book comes out in April, making a very strong case that we, and several other species, are products of group selection. But really the way to think about this is as multilevel selection. So look at it this way: You've got competition going on within groups and across groups. So here's a group of guys on a college crew team. Within this team there's competition. There are guys competing with each other. The slowest rowers, the weakest rowers, are going to get cut from the team. And only a few of these guys are going to go on in the sport. Maybe one of them will make it to the Olympics. So within the team, their interests are actually pitted against each other. And sometimes it would be advantageous for one of these guys to try to sabotage the other guys. Maybe he'll badmouth his chief rival to the coach. But while that competition is going on within the boat, this competition is going on across boats.And once you put these guys in a boat competing with another boat, now they've got no choice but to cooperate because they're all in the same boat. They can only win if they all pull together as a team. I mean, these things sound trite, but they are deep evolutionary truths. The main argument against group selection has always been that, well sure, it would be nice to have a group of cooperators, but as soon as you have a group of cooperators, they're just going to get taken over by free-riders, individuals that are going to exploit the hard work of the others. Let me illustrate this for you. Suppose we've got a group of little organisms — they can be bacteria, they can be hamsters; it doesn't matter what — and let's suppose that this little group here, they evolved to be cooperative.Well that's great. They graze, they defend each other, they work together, they generate wealth. And as you'll see in this simulation, as they interact they gain points, as it were, they grow, and when they've doubled in size, you'll see them split, and that's how they reproduce and the population grows. But suppose then that one of them mutates. There's a mutation in the gene and one of them mutates to follow a selfish strategy. It takes advantage of the others. And so when a green interacts with a blue, you'll see the green gets larger and the blue gets smaller. So here's how things play out. We start with just one green, and as it interacts it gains wealth or points or food.And in short order, the cooperators are done for. The free-riders have taken over. If a group cannot solve the free-rider problem then it cannot reap the benefits of cooperation and group selection cannot get started. But there are solutions to the free-rider problem. It's not that hard a problem. In fact, nature has solved it many, many times. And nature's favorite solution is to put everyone in the same boat.For example, why is it that the mitochondria in every cell has its own DNA, totally separate from the DNA in the nucleus? It's because they used to be separate free-living bacteria and they came together and became a superorganism. Somehow or other — maybe one swallowed another; we'll never know exactly why — but once they got a membrane around them, they were all in the same membrane, now all the wealth-created division of labor, all the greatness created by cooperation, stays locked inside the membrane and we've got a superorganism. And now let's rerun the simulation putting one of these superorganisms into a population of free-riders, of defectors, of cheaters and look what happens. A superorganism can basically take what it wants.It's so big and powerful and efficient that it can take resources from the greens, from the defectors, the cheaters. And pretty soon the whole population is actually composed of these new superorganisms. What I've shown you here is sometimes called a major transition in evolutionary history. Darwin's laws don't change, but now there's a new kind of player on the field and things begin to look very different. Now this transition was not a one-time freak of nature that just happened with some bacteria. It happened again about 120 or a 140 million years ago when some solitary wasps began creating little simple, primitive nests, or hives. Once several wasps were all together in the same hive, they had no choice but to cooperate, because pretty soon they were locked into competition with other hives.And the most cohesive hives won, just as Darwin said. These early wasps gave rise to the bees and the ants that have covered the world and changed the biosphere. And it happened again, even more spectacularly, in the last half-million years when our own ancestors became cultural creatures, they came together around a hearth or a campfire, they divided labor, they began painting their bodies, they spoke their own dialects, and eventually they worshiped their own gods. Once they were all in the same tribe, they could keep the benefits of cooperation locked inside. And they unlocked the most powerful force ever known on this planet, which is human cooperation — a force for construction and destruction. Of course, human groups are nowhere near as cohesive as beehives. Human groups may look like hives for brief moments, but they tend to then break apart. We're not locked into cooperation the way bees and ants are. In fact, often, as we've seen happen in a lot of the Arab Spring revolts, often those divisions are along religious lines. Nonetheless, when people do come together and put themselves all into the same movement, they can move mountains.Look at the people in these photos I've been showing you. Do you think they're there pursuing their self-interest? Or are they pursuing communal interest, which requires them to lose themselves and become simply a part of a whole? Okay, so that was my Talk delivered in the standard TED way. And now I'm going to give the whole Talk over again in three minutes in a more full-spectrum sort of way. (Music) (Video) Jonathan Haidt: We humans have many varieties of religious experience, as William James explained. One of the most common is climbing the secret staircase and losing ourselves.The staircase takes us from the experience of life as profane or ordinary upwards to the experience of life as sacred, or deeply interconnected. We are Homo duplex, as Durkheim explained. And we are Homo duplex because we evolved by multilevel selection, as Darwin explained. I can't be certain if the staircase is an adaptation rather than a bug, but if it is an adaptation, then the implications are profound. If it is an adaptation, then we evolved to be religious. I don't mean that we evolved to join gigantic organized religions. Those things came along too recently. I mean that we evolved to see sacredness all around us and to join with others into teams and circle around sacred objects, people and ideas. This is why politics is so tribal. Politics is partly profane, it's partly about self-interest, but politics is also about sacredness. It's about joining with others to pursue moral ideas.It's about the eternal struggle between good and evil, and we all believe we're on the good team. And most importantly, if the staircase is real, it explains the persistent undercurrent of dissatisfaction in modern life. Because human beings are, to some extent, hivish creatures like bees. We're bees. We busted out of the hive during the Enlightenment. We broke down the old institutions and brought liberty to the oppressed. We unleashed Earth-changing creativity and generated vast wealth and comfort. Nowadays we fly around like individual bees exulting in our freedom. But sometimes we wonder: Is this all there is? What should I do with my life? What's missing? What's missing is that we are Homo duplex, but modern, secular society was built to satisfy our lower, profane selves. It's really comfortable down here on the lower level. Come, have a seat in my home entertainment center.One great challenge of modern life is to find the staircase amid all the clutter and then to do something good and noble once you climb to the top. I see this desire in my students at the University of Virginia. They all want to find a cause or calling that they can throw themselves into. They're all searching for their staircase. And that gives me hope because people are not purely selfish. Most people long to overcome pettiness and become part of something larger. And this explains the extraordinary resonance of this simple metaphor conjured up nearly 400 years ago. "No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." JH: Thank you. (Applause).


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Friends Season 3 Episode 3 : The One With The Jam
Phoebe dates a man who thinks he's stalking her twin sister. Ross and Rachel give Chandler "boyfriend" lessons. Monica uses her free time after breaking up with Richard to make jam and considers artificial insemination through a sperm bank.
Episode Guide
Season 01
Season 02
Season 03
Season 04
Season 05
Season 06
Season 07
Season 08
Season 09
Season 10


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Declaration by the UNESCO Director General concerning Virunga National Park, World Heritage site
The Director-General of UNESCO, Koïchiro Matsuura, said today he was alarmed by the violent incidents taking place in the province of North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Mr Matsuura voice his support to the statement made earlier by the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon, calling on "all parties to immediately cease hostilities and pursue in good faith efforts to resolve peacefully the issues."
"The escalation of violence in recent weeks threatens the integrity of a DRC World Heritage site, Virunga National Park, which comprises outstanding biological diversity and provides the habitat for the last populations of mountain gorillas, a highly endangered species," declared the Director-General. "According to the information I have received, the park rangers can no longer patrol and the gorillas' habitat is threatened by the persistent shooting." Mr Matsuura also stressed that a site's inscription on the World Heritage List confirms its outstanding universal value and engages the responsibility of the entire international community to ensure its protection.
The Director-General called on all combatants to respect the integrity of the World Heritage site and to settle their conflict peacefully.


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President Obama will end his second term with more vacancies on the federal courts than there were when he started. Today there are 99 vacancies on the federal circuit and district courts, 33 of which are for courts that are so busy that they've been officially designated "judicial emergencies." This glut of vacancies is in large part due to Senate Republicans' persistent obstruction of the president's nominees – even the ones from their own states who they purportedly support. During President Obama's first term, judicial nominees have had to wait on average three times as long after committee approval for a vote from the full Senate as did nominees in President George W. Bush's first term.
But some vacancies are due to a less well-known but all too common delay at the very start of the nominations process.
Before he makes a nomination to the federal judiciary, President Obama asks senators from the state where the vacancy has occurred to present him with recommendations. It's a way to identify nominees from any given state and to ensure home-state, often bipartisan, support for nominees. The problem is, senators from both parties have too often dragged their feet in recommending acceptable nominees, leading to often years-long vacancies in the federal courts.
These vacancies exist despite the fact that most federal judges give months, sometimes even a full year of notice before retiring or taking senior status (semi-retirement) so that a replacement can be found.
This week, senators from Colorado and New Mexico showed how the process is meant to work – and how it would work, if all senators followed their lead.
In Colorado, district court judge Wiley Daniel announced last winter that he would be leaving his seat in January 2013. Colorado senators Mark Udall and Michael Bennet set up a bipartisan commission to find qualified nominees for the seat in a timely manner. They then recommended a set of finalists to the White House, which in turn nominated Raymond P. Moore on Tuesday, before the seat he would fill becomes vacant. Of the 18 future vacancies currently listed by the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts, Colorado is one of only two states with a nominee.
In New Mexico, Judge Bruce Black announced in June that he would be leaving the court in October, just a few short months. So New Mexico's senators, Tom Udall and Jeff Bingaman, announced their bipartisan commission that very day, leading to the president's nomination yesterday of Kenneth John Gonzales to fill the vacancy.
There is no excuse for seats on the federal courts to be left open for years, as caseloads multiply and litigants face delays. The senators from Colorado and New Mexico showed how the front end of the judicial nominations process can be efficient and fair.


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Gas prices fall to 4-1/2 year low
National average price for unleaded gas hits $1.648, says AAA, falling nearly 60% from this summer's record highs.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Christmas travelers haven't paid this little for gasoline in nearly five years.
Gas prices declined for the sixth straight day on Thursday, falling below the $1.65 per gallon, according to a national survey of credit card swipes at gasoline stations.
The nationwide average price dropped to $1.648 a gallon, down 0.7 cents from Wednesday's $1.655, according to motorist group AAA. The survey bases its information on credit card swipes from up to 100,000 service stations across the nation.
Gas prices were at their lowest national average since Feb 20, 2004 AAA reported.
The plunge in the nationwide average price comes as welcome news to Americans who are traveling for the Christmas holiday.
Still, motor travel has continued to fall off even as gas prices have plummeted nearly $2.50 since this summer's record highs. Americans drove 100 billion fewer miles during the 12-month period between November 2007 and October 2008 compared with the prior year, according to the a recent report from the Department of Transportation.
As this year's recession deepened, demand for fuel waned, sending oil prices down more than $110, or 76% from July 11. Gas prices have dropped off 60% since they hit a record-high of $4.114 on July 17.
Now, average gas prices are below $2 a gallon in all 48 contiguous states. Utah had the cheapest gas, averaging $1.463.
Alaska continued to have the highest price at $2.591 per gallon, followed by Hawaii, which stands at $2.37.


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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke publicly for the first time on an issue he has been working on privately for months -- immigration reform.
Zuckerberg on Monday night helped introduce a film titled "Documented" and told a crowd of hundreds at the film screening it is time to fix the broken system.
"Someone did a study and it showed half of tech companies are founded by immigrants," he said. "These are issues that don't just touch our industry, but really touch the whole country."
The tech giant also said he was frustrated with immigration issues related to work visas. But it was school kids who inspired him to act.
"I asked the kids what they were worried about. One raised his hands and said I'm not sure I can go to college because I'm undocumented, it touched me," he said.
Zuckerberg formed FWD.US with friends and fellow tech leaders. Big names are joining the effort to pressure members of Congress to make comprehensive reforms.
Bay Area immigration lawyer Lourdes Martinez calls it a natural partnership.
"I think it's valuable, something we've been talking about for many years," Martinez said. "How to bring in (the) business sector to support reform because immigrants are part of the economy."
View more in Jean Elle's video report above.
More NBC Bay Area Stories:


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You May Have Seen These Fox Graphics Before -- In A GOP Press Release
Written by Matt Gertz
Fox News cribbed research and graphics directly from a National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) press release without disclosing their origin in order to attack President Obama's purported "sequester priorities."
In a Fox & Friends Saturday interview with NRCC chairman Greg Walden, co-host Tucker Carlson claimed that he was "going through a list here" of supposedly wasteful federal spending projects and crucial programs that are impacted by the mandatory spending cuts required by sequestration, but did not explain where that list originated. Every case of both worthwhile and allegedly worthless spending they discussed had previously been highlighted in a February 28 NRCC press release.
Later in the segment, Carlson asked Walden, "wouldn't it make sense for Republicans to come up with a list, push that list over to the White House, and publicize that list of pointless programs like this that ought to be cut?" Walden replied, "Absolutely."
Throughout this segment and a second segment Fox aired on-screen graphics that mimicked images included in the NRCC release in order to criticized what they termed Obama's "sequestration priorities." Here are those images, with the Fox versions on the left and NRCC versions on the right:
Fox News has repeatedly cut and pasted or otherwise parroted GOP materials without disclosing the partisan source of the research. In graphics used for one 2009 segment, Fox News even replicated a typo that had been included in the Republican research document that the network was reproducing without disclosure. After anchor Jon Scott subsequently apologized for the typo. CNN host Howard Kurtz castigated Scott at the time, saying that the Fox anchor should apologize for repeating "partisan propaganda from the GOP" unsourced.
Here are the Fox & Friends Saturday segments, in which Carlson interviewed Walden and Wall Street Journal editorial board member Jason Riley:
UPDATE: On the March 4 edition of MSNBC's Politics Nation host Al Sharpton and guest Joe Madison discussed the Fox graphics and their NRCC origins.


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After a month of waiting, bbPress 0.74 is finally available for download. Even if it did take a while, we've fixed a several important things.
Aditya has a great overview of the changes, but here's a few of the bigger ones.
hook has been changed tobb_init
for better compatibility with WordPress.- When users are deleted, they're really deleted now.
- Somewhat simpler installation procedure. When installing, you'll also be informed if any of those little configuration variables are incorrectly set.
- A place to store options in the database! Woo!
We've got some slick new features we're working on for the next release (did someone say "themes"?), so stick around….
In the meantime, read on for some more technical details about this release.
For your viewing pleasure, you can check out a list of tickets closed and code committed for this release. A list of new bugs we've introduced is forthcoming 🙂
Also, Aditya has compiled a list of the new hooks and has graciously allowed me to post them here for all you developers to see.
- get_forums_where: Filter the Where clause to get all forums
- get_forum_where: Filter the Where clause to get single forum
- get_forums: Filter the forums retrieved
- bb_get_option_{option_name}: Filter the value of the option
- bb_get_option_from_db_{option_name}: Filter the value of the option retrieved from database
- bb_delete_meta: Filter the delete meta data variables
- bb_verify_email: Filter the verification of email
- bb_title: Filter Title being displayed
- bb_get_title: Filter the title
- post_author_title: Filter the title of the author being displayed
- post_author_type: Filter the Role of the author being displayed
- allowed_markup: Filter the display of the allowed markup
- get_allowed_markup: Filter the allowed markup
- get_user_type_label: Filter the display of User Type (Role)
- get_user_type: Filter the User Type (Role)
- user_title: Filter the display of User Title
- get_user_title: Filter the User Title
- tag_heat_map: Filter the display of tag_heat_map
- sanitize_profile_info: Filter the Profile Info Keys
- sanitize_profile_admin: Filter the Profile Admin Keys
- bb_ajax_{action_name}: Custom action for Ajax
- bb_delete_user: Custom action when deleting user
- sort_tag_heat_map: Hook for sorting the tag heat map
- bb_init: Remember,
has changed tobb_init
. This will break some plugins that used the init hook.


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New Orleans Saints general manager Mickey Loomis said Wednesday that he had "nothing to report" on long-term extension talks with tight end Jimmy Graham. One big reason: They are waiting to confirm whether he's really a tight end or not.
The NFL Players Association filed a grievance on behalf of Graham Wednesday, according to NFL Media Insider Ian Rapoport. USA Today first reported the story. The expected move was a long time coming, but it's the next necessary step in Graham's contract process. By waiting until this week to file the grievance, the decision will get maximum attention.
The Saintsplaced the franchise tag on Graham back in February, with the franchise number for tight ends being $7.035 million. Graham has not signed his one-year tender offer, and the NFLPA is going to make the case that Graham should be counted as a wide receiver because so many of his snaps happen away from the line of scrimmage. The wide receiver franchise tag number is $12.3 million.
We believe it's a longshot that Graham will win this grievance, but there is some historical precedent for compromise. Terrell Suggs argued in 2008 that he should be counted as a defensive end, not a linebacker. An arbitrator wound up bumping up Suggs' salary.
Graham has a tougher case to make, and there is more money at stake here. We wouldn't be surprised if the Saints and Graham compromise on a long-term contract before the grievance is even settled.
*The "Around The League Podcast" Draft Preview Spectacular is all you need before draft day. *


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Philippe, king of Belgium
Our editors will review what you've submitted and determine whether to revise the article.
- In full:
- Philippe Léopold Louis Marie
- Notable Family Members:
- spouse Mathilde, queen of Belgium
Philippe, king of Belgium, (born April 15, 1960, Brussels, Belgium), king of the Belgians from 2013.
Philippe was the first of three children of Albert II, who became Belgium's sixth king in 1993. He received his early education in both Flemish and French, after which he attended the Royal Military Academy and studied abroad at Trinity College, Oxford, and at Stanford University, where he earned a master's degree (1985) in political science. He trained as a pilot and paratrooper and ultimately held the rank of lieutenant general in both the Belgian army and air force and of vice admiral in the Belgian navy. It had been expected in 1993, upon the death of King Baudouin I, that Albert would abdicate in favour of Philippe, but Albert elected to take the throne, and some speculated that Philippe, then 33 and unmarried, was not yet prepared to lead the country. Philippe was appointed honorary chairman of the Belgian Foreign Trade Board in 1993 and in that capacity conducted numerous visits abroad. From 1993 he also served as chairman of the National (now Federal) Council for Sustainable Development. In June 1994 he became a member of the Belgian Senate.
In September 1999 Philippe announced his engagement to Mathilde d'Udekem d'Acoz. Although the two had been a couple for several years, both their relationship and the details of their first meeting were kept from the press. Mathilde proved to be wildly popular with the Belgian public, and her ability to speak both French and Flemish (as well as English and Italian) bridged the political and cultural differences that separated the regions of Wallonia and Flanders. Their wedding on December 4, 1999, united the country and drew comparisons to the storybook wedding of Britain's Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. Since 2004 Philippe served as an honorary chairman for the European chapter of the Club of Rome, a political and economic think tank. In 2013 Albert announced his intention to abdicate because of failing health, and on July 21, 2013, Philippe was crowned king of the Belgians. His daughter, Princess Elisabeth, was named duchess of Brabant as the heir to the throne.


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Sunday, April 29, 2007
Memoir Required Reading
Writerly folks who enjoy talking about (or writing) memoirs may want to check this out. In late March, Slate ran a series of articles on the State of the Memoir, about 15+ pieces on all aspects the the memoir, especially writing about family and its many repercussions.
And here's the list of pieces ( I think these links will work too). Lots of interesting opinions here.
"For Whom the Memoir Tolls: How to write about the dead," by Allen Shawn. Posted March 29, 2007.
"Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone," by Elizabeth Rubin and Mike Vazquez. Posted March 29, 2007.
"Collateral Damage: How I told a former lover I had written about him," by Edmund White. Posted March 29, 2007.
"Just Screw It: Writing about my family's feud over the Sweet'n Low fortune," by Rich Cohen. Posted March 29, 2007.
"Momma's Boy: How I wrote a memoir about the mother I once hated," by John Dickerson. Posted March 28, 2007.
"Inside Autism: What two memoirs can tell us about the disease du jour," by Ann Hulbert. Posted March 28, 2007.
"Ivory-Tower Ambassador: The studying, and selling, of America," by Christopher Benfey. Posted March 28, 2007.
"In a Land Far, Far Away: How I wrote a memoir about my father," by Danielle Trussoni. Posted March 28, 2007.
"Publish, Then Flee: How to tell your family you're writing about them," by Sean Wilsey. Posted March 28, 2007.
"Road to Nowhere: My life as a victim of Hurricane Katrina and the ineffectual Road Home program," by Blake Bailey. Posted March 27, 2007.
"When Irish Tongues Are Talking: How I told my colleagues, family, and former countrymen I was writing about them," by Frank McCourt. Post March 27, 2007.
"The Woman Warrior at 30: Maxine Hong Kingston's secrets and lies," by Jess Row. Posted March 27, 2007.
"My, Myself, and I: The role of autobiography in contemporary poetry," by Dan Chiasson and Meghan O'Rourke. Posted March 27, 2007.
"What the Little Old Ladies Feel: How I told my mother about my memoir," by Alison Bechdel. Posted March 27, 2007.
"The Liars' Club: How I told my friends I was writing about my childhood—and what they said in return," by Mary Karr. Posted March 27, 2007.
Friday, April 27, 2007
Moms Who Write
Monday, April 23, 2007
My Essay in new Special Gifts Book
So here it is - the cover of the anthology in which my essay, Thump, appears. Mine is the opening essay in the collection, which features reflections from more than 40 mothers about the unique experience of raising a special needs child.
Special Gifts: Women Writers on the Heartache, the Happiness and the Hope in Raising a Special Needs Child, will be out in June 2007. When that happens, you can order it on the Amazon and Barnes & Nobles sites.
Meantime, ask your local independent book store to order it from the publisher!
My piece is about the journey I took with my son Sean, navigating through his multiple developmental difficulties, without the comforting map of a specific diagnosis -- and how, at age 12, Sean was ready to face his world without the support of all the different therapies, interventions, and special accommodations that had been a major part of his childhood until then. The question was: Could I let him be the "normal" child he had become? Giving up the role of mother-advocate was not an easy transition for me. But, as he had done all his life, Sean showed me the way.
Only Day One of Kids School Vacation
- Why is it that all of the events that, when they happen, make me feel like I am the most horrible parent on the face of the planet, but later make the best fodder for writing about what it's like -- what it's really like -- being a mother?
- How much I would like to slap across the face all the vapid reporters allowed to wield microphones and ask parents of murdered children what it felt like when they got the news.
- Why my sons, ages 9 and 13, know precisely what aggravates me -- from crumbs on the computer keyboard to overly-talkative salespeople -- yet my husband often hasn't a clue. He eats chips at the computer nightly and likes listening to product highlights from the commission-only guys at Best Buy.
- How I am going to finish revising four 15-page personal essays this week (about the above-mentioned worst moments in motherhood) for two of my MFA requirements with both boys home from school. Did it have to coincide with Turn Off The TV Week which, for some counterintuitive reason, they think is a good idea?
- Where to find a butter dish that fits into the door of my 25-year-old refrigerator. Target and KMart both bombed out. Since when did butter dishes get so stylish?


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By Sulia Altenberg
For the last nine months I have spent a majority of my weekdays in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The first six of those were spent living in an actual apartment with twelve other people in a West Amsterdam neighborhood, riding my bike to the final four classes of my undergrad. For the last three months, however, I have been living each day in an Amsterdam attic right here in Minnesota, at Park Square, in The Diary of Anne Frank.
The day after I was given a role of a lifetime, I couldn't sit in my dingy room with its horrible Internet in West Amsterdam. I had long wanted to go into the "Hollandsche Schouwberg," as it's exterior walls are clad with Hebrew that I didn't understand. I thought, "how lovely, a theater building commemorating Dutch Jews."
The beautiful Jewish theater that once stood there has now become the Dutch Holocaust Memorial, with a list of the every murdered Jewish Dutch family name, a museum, and a large courtyard with tulips, all to commemorate the 107,000 Jews that were persecuted and killed by the Nazi party in the area where the theater seats and stage were. On the list of family names I found my own last name, Altenberg, then I found the Franks, the Van Pels and the Pfeiffers. It will never ever be fair that I, a Jewish woman, got to go home after visiting that theater, to America, to perform the story on stage, portraying the Holocaust's most famous victim. It will never be fair that the people who hold my same last name were dragged to this theater, and would never see their home again.
This year, it was decided that the diary entries which are written into the script as voice-overs, would instead be performed live onstage. It is so wonderful when the kids out there get excited, you can hear them and feel them when they sympathize with Mrs. Frank as Anne pushes her away, when they scream and clap for Anne and Peter's first kiss, and when they cheer for the news of the D-Day invasion. Keeping it fresh for those kids everyday, however, is the hardest part, but I get to use all those memories of Amsterdam and all those emotions I have attached to those memories to get me to be as genuine as possible.
Anne makes the choice to be brave, she and I adjust our backpack straps and we stand tall and we are okay to go face the Nazis. In many ways I live my life in the gap of the dreams that were never fulfilled by Anne. She too wanted to be an actress, "a famous dancer or singer, or something wonderful!" That is how you cope with your Jewish survivor's guilt; you live your life the way you want to.
The cool thing is, I get to make Anne's dreams come true too. I get to help her go on living after her death, even if it just is for 40 performances.


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The Story of a Cruise Ship Cook
Letter from a crew member
I was hired to work as a third party in Costa Cruises. I arrived in Palermo to board the Costa Magica in the period they call Dry Dock, when the ship is out of service for passengers, only renovating.
On the first day of work I had a little trouble understanding people because the kitchen is the majority of Indians and Filipinos, and their accent is really hard to understand at first, and then pronounced them good, but they speak so fast that when you understand the first word he is at the end of the sentence ... But okay, I worked in the bakery itself just this week, because we made a few cakes for crew dessert. I worked and two Brazilian girls who were in the same situation as me (as the newly shipped third pastry), about 8 hours a day, half of the period confeitando cakes for dessert and the other half of the crew working on the crew mess (the restaurant crew ), a work super soft, nothing too different than working on land.
Until then I was super happy and peaceful feeling that my life would be that easy all inside the ship. After a week of dry dock is over, the capo (boss) of pastry showed us where we would work and how it would work and everything else ...
Began crossing (crossing the ocean) and started working for real. The capo has delegated the functions of confectioners at a meeting on the first day of work, and they informed me that because I was the last man boarded the pastry I would be responsible for Cambuza, ie (screwed up) had to take care of searching the entire stock of confectionery for all others could work. Outside it was still responsible for some activities within the confectionery and responsible for cleaning a specific area of confectionery.
What I had to seek daily in Cambuza (stock) were basically, 200 liters of milk, 200 liters of cream, 75 kg of flour, 100 kg of sugar ... out many other ingredients that formed a gigantic list daily.
When finished doing all the work inventory was responsible for making some preparations and mainly help in the assembly line of dishes for lunch and dinner, which was approximately 500 plates per period (lunch and dinner), and serve in bowls for ice cream that waiters bring him into the hall.
At the end of the work day, I was responsible for washing the refrigeration of confectionery, namely having to wash a floor in a place that was constantly at -20 º C, had to play a lot of hot water and pull as soon as possible so that not freeze the ground. This in normal days of cleaning, General Cleaning when there was much worse, was deep cleaning.
Although much work had moments of relaxation within the confectionery, was a good environment to work many times, but the fatigue was much greater than the fun. When you enter the ship they tell you that you can not work more than 11 hours a day, but do not dream that they only want you to do your hours and go, the average hours worked per day is 14 hours. Hinders 8hrs was until 14hrs, made a break until 16:30, and worked normally until 2hrs in the morning. Sometimes making breaks of 30 minutes for lunch and dinner. In the days of hard work we were going until after 3hrs and we had practically no one hour break in the afternoon, if Christmas and New Year.
My first month was hard, when I came home for a visit I will never return to the ship, but with time I got used to my routine and had quiet inside the ship, one way or another you end up getting used.
But to complete 2 months aboard began to feel severe back pain, I was a week without working inside the ship and taking anti-inflammatory injections to relieve the pain, I have not had a bit of improvement and I disembarked for medical treatment. On land did tests and discovered that I acquired in 2 months of hard work 3 herniated discs, which will probably need an operation so I can go back to being able to work and have a normal life.
The treatment is paid by Costa, but I disembarked from the beginning of January and have not started doing any treatment because they are holding my treatment ... are also sending me paychecks on a percentage of my salary, checks that are almost impossible to be discounted (and still could not cash them). You ask me if it was worth going to work on the ship after being caught bad back and have a support company ... I say it was worth it, because those months I spent aboard the Costa Magica were precious to my personal and professional growth, I learned a lot and met many good people inside, Brazilian, Indian, Filipino, Italian, Indonesian, Chinese people that would never have known.
Do not create expectations and / or fears by stories told to you.


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"I feel the scientific study of UFOs is for the benefit of humankind and is an important endeavor. The weekly intelligence report provides you with information on the latest sightings and UFO news that you need to understand the world situation."
In special reports, this week's files cover: Russell Crowe Captures UFO on Film, Mars Rover Finds Ancient Stream-bed-Proof of Flowing Water, NASA Says Mars Had Life in the Past,
Are UFOs Signaling Data? Australian Diamond UFO Sightings, Filmmakers Capture and Icebergs Melting Quickly.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Virginia.
Sightings of UFOs were also reported in: Australia, Canada, Germany, India, Mexico, South Africa, Sweden, and England in the United Kingdom.
The purpose of these files is to report the UFO eyewitness and photo/video evidence that occurs on a daily basis around the world and in space. These Files assume that extraterrestrial intelligent life not only exists, but my hypothesis is that the over a thousand UFOs reported each month represent technologically advanced spacecraft conducting surveillance of Earth. I personally became interested in UFOs when London Control ordered me to intercept one over England while flying for the US Air Force and Prince Phillip told me of his personal interest in UFOs. The US Air Force investigated UFOs for more than twenty years under Project Blue Book; and I continue this advanced research. I believe the God of the universe has spread life throughout the cosmos and UFO's are visiting us in ever-increasing numbers.
Filer's Files are now being emailed to 13,800 addresses each week plus 500 copies are forwarded to more thousands. Consider forwarding them to your friends and neighbors.
Dedicated to 5 year old Georgie Filer V whose motto was "Be Happy" and Eddie Pedrick my grandsons who drowned and I was notified my daughter Elizabeth Lynn died Monday.
Special Reports
Russell Crowe Captures UFO on Film
Photo from Austin, Texas on February 8, 2013,
SYDNEY — Actor Russell Crowe claims to have captured possible UFO evidence on film from a balcony in Sydney, Australia.
In a series of Twitter updates, Crowe — who won the best-actor Oscar for his role in "Gladiator" and recently starred in another Oscar-nominated film, "Les Miserable's"— insists that the pictures are real and that they don't show reflections or lens flare. What the YouTube video does show is a series of three timed-exposure photos, with a flat red light moving across the frame. Crowe said the pictures were taken by a Canon 5D with no flash that was set up on the balcony of his office in the Sydney suburb of Woolloomooloo to capture pictures of fruit bats rising from the gardens. "This was a big surprise," Crowe wrote.
Some commenter's quickly speculated that the UFO was nothing more than reflections from a light, perhaps from a beacon on a sailboat that was passing through nearby Woolloomooloo Bay. But Crowe defended the sighting: "The camera is on a balcony, not behind glass," he told one questioner. "Can't be a lens flare because it moves, camera is fixed," he said in another tweet.
Contacted yesterday Crowe's Aussie rep clarified the alleged UFO video, shot by acclaimed cinematographer Duane Manwiller, was actually filmed in Sydney four years ago.
Asked why Crowe chose to release it now, Vandenberg said: "I have no idea."
The decision to release the old footage came several hours after the actor made a handful of obvious digs at the studio behind his latest flick Broken City"
"Mars Rover Finds Ancient Stream-bed-Proof of Flowing Water."
By examining the makeup of some of the rock formations and the many rounded pebbles nearby, the Curiosity team concluded that a fast-flowing stream once came off the crater rim and ran to the area near the rover's landing site. "Unlike the megafloods, these smaller rivers or streams are believed to have run for thousands or millions of years, rather than days or months." Morgan said. "There are huge reservoirs of ice beneath the surface and we don't really know much about its relationship with the surface."
"But the Marte Vallis finding makes
clear that water from deep in the planet can and has surged to the surface through rock fractures in the relatively recent past," he said. "And it is within the realm of possibility that something similar could set off another megaflood in the future.
Evidence of a megaflood on Mars—a surprisingly recent one that cut a 600-mile (966-kilometer) river channel into the planet—has been detected by radar from an orbiting satellite.
Scientists have known for some time about the existence of the Marte Vallis channel system. But the new radar research has doubled the estimated depth of the massive flow and identified the headwaters and floodplain of the river. The megaflood and volcano are considered especially significant because they occurred so recently, in geological terms, suggesting that Mars may well remain a geologically active planet today.
Before a new picture of Mars began to emerge over the past decade, the planet was considered to have been cold, dry, and largely geologically dead for more than three billion years.
"What we've found is that the source of this megaflood was water deep underground that was delivered to the surface through tectonic fractures," said Gareth Morgan of the Smithsonian Institution's Air and Space Museum, one of several authors of the article appearing in the journal Science.
"The source of the water, and the size of the outflow, had been something of a mystery, but the radar allowed us to look below the lava flows and see what existed there before," he said.
Morgan likened the scale of the Marte Vallis flood to that of the Missoula outpourings of some 15,000 years ago what is now Washington and Oregon. After the breaking of an ice dam at glacial Lake Missoula, the water surged westward and flooded the 200-mile-long lake in 48 hours.
The power of the water dug deep channels into the hardened lava, or basalt.
True Gullies on Mars
Images like this from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show portions of the Martian surface in unprecedented detail. This one shows many channels from 1 meter to 10 meters (3 feet to 33 feet) wide on a scarp in the Hellas impact basin. On Earth we would call these gullies. Some larger channels on Mars that are sometimes called gullies are big enough to be called ravines on Earth. Thanks to JPL University of Arizona.
The radar has been used extensively to investigate the Martian poles, and only more recently have investigators focused on areas such as the equatorial Elysium Planitia, the site of Marte Vallis.
These deep river channels on Mars were formed roughly 3.7 to 3.1 billion years ago. Estimated to run for 600 miles (966 kilometers) or more, these channels are some 60 miles (97 kilometers) wide. By analyzing the characteristics of the channel, the team concluded that the water flow was 262 feet (80 meters) or deeper.
Watery Revolution
The new finding is part of a recent revolution in water discoveries on Mars. Not only have researchers identified deep river channels, but they've discovered gullies of liquid water that are still forming and streams of salty water that appear to flow down some crater walls during the Martian summer.
The Mars rover Curiosity has identified a river or streambed that once tumbled into Gale Crater.
In the Earth's past there was powerful volcanic activity which could have easily spewed dirt and rocks containing microbes into outer space which not only could have eventually reached Mars but also ended up traveling in orbit through space that we now know as meteors. A Newsweek article of September 21, 1998, p.12 mentions exactly this possibility. "We think there's about 7 million tons of earth soil sitting on Mars", says scientist and evolutionist Kenneth Nealson. "You have to consider the possibility that if we find life on Mars, it could have come from the Earth" National Geographic News Published March 7, 2013.
NASA Says Mars Had Life in Past
Mars may well have been a pleasant place for tiny microbes to live, with plenty of water as well as minerals that could have served as food, NASA scientists said Tuesday at a news conference on the latest findings from their Mars rover. But they have yet to find signs that actual microbes did live in that oasis.
"That's two places in our tiny solar system where our kind of life was possible, out of the myriads of solar systems in the galaxy. The egocentric view of the universe just took another hit."
"We have found a habitable environment that is so benign and supportive of life that probably if this water was around and you had been on the planet, you would have been able to drink it," said John P. Grotzinger, the California Institute of Technology geology professor who is the principal investigator for the NASA mission.
In drilling into its first rock, a fine-grained mudstone, the scientists said, the rover Curiosity — a self-contained science laboratory about the size of a Mini Cooper — sent back to Earth convincing evidence that Mars was once awash in water.
Curiosity scientists identified elements in the rocks — sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon — that are some of the key ingredients of life, as well as minerals, like sulfates and sulfides, that primitive microbes could eat for food. Dr. Grotzinger said these minerals are "effectively like batteries" and can provide an energy source for life. Thanks to NASA.
From Forests to Deserts in Only 34 Years
Yesterday, NASA spread the most recent and highest resolution photo of Earth in history. Compared with the photo from 1978, it is evident that the planet has deteriorated in large amounts.
Robert M. Collins writes, "The planet cannot sustain an exploding population 7 billion and growing. I predict that unless attitudes change rapidly Mother Earth will take care of the over population and it won't be very pretty." Robert M. Collins
Are UFOs Signaling Data?
Kenneth Larson writes, "My current drawings concern the Columbus landing at San Salvador Island where he landed on Oct. 12, 1492. He and his assistant reportedly saw a bright light in the evening sky and they landed the next day.
My drawings relate to Columbus 1492 landing and the UFOs over Gulf Breeze in 1992, or 500 years later; and also the four triangular UFOs seen in March 2012 over Jacksonville, Florida.
My drawings also concern the Maya Mesoamerica area that is Book of Mormon country and Old Jerusalem in 600 BC and Zion center or Independence, Missouri site dedicated by the prophet and seer Joseph Smith on August 3, 1831, under great hardship conditions of that era."
All that I can do is record the data as I receive it in the form of drawings and typed texts and publish some of my books. If people ignore my research discoveries that is their problem. All I can do is trust in the Lord and lean not unto my own understanding so as to be guided by the Lord and Holy Spirit. Columbus said, "The Holy Spirit guided him to the New World." The equilateral triangular UFOs relate to the Earth's measured designs and units and the UFOs may have helped create and design our nine planet solar system and possibly other exoplanets under an intelligent Creator (Genesis 1:1, Job 38:4-7, Isaiah 40:12,22..
With scientists saying the Earth is 4.5 billion years old and Big Bang 13.75 billion years old no wonder we can't understand the UFOs–a thousand years to us could be 24 hours to UFOs.
Oddly, scientists say the Russian meteorite that exploded last week came from the debris field between the 4th planet Mars and the 5th planet Jupiter in our solar system–and I discovered that Kenneth Arnold said, "There was a wide space between the fourth UFO four and the fifth UFO he saw near Mount Rainier on June 24, 1947. My World Atlas illustration of a side view shows a similar space between 4th planet Mars and 5th planet Jupiter in our nine planet solar system and this debris space is also where the rare and exploding Russian meteorite came from last week. Wow! Keep looking up." Thanks to
Kenneth Larson <ke*****@ao*.com
Australian Diamond UFO Sightings
Nancy Talbot writes, "The primary story is an Australian guy's is videotaping UFO's nearly every night. Then the fact that some of his UFOs have the same diamond shape as UFOs videotaped by Megan another Aussie, when she was in England to see crop circles. Then the fact that this diamond-shaped UFO has been videotaped in several other parts of the world."
He's got a YouTube site now so that people can see some of what is going on around him. Here's the story, explaining the connection I see with other events in the UK and in Holland (which include photos never made public before. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPMIXuWKGBE
In July 2007, an Australian crop circle enthusiast, Megan Heazlewild, was visiting Wiltshire, England to see the crop circles. While staying in an Avebury BandB one night she watched, and then videotaped, a series of amber-colored, diamond-shaped UFOs which kept appearing in the sky not far from Silbury Hill.
The husband and wife owners of the BandB also watched the objects as Megan videotaped them over almost half an hour.
Diamonds over Avebury, England
Many of the people who have seen the video are certain the objects are military flares (there are military bases not too far from the Avebury area) and–because of both the color and some of the behavior of Megan's objects–I also have wondered if they were flares. Here are a couple of screen-shots from her video and the YouTube link.
Note: These objects do not descend like flares with parachutes.
Italy UFOs photographed.
Hope you find this of interest…..Nancy Talbott, BLT Research Team
Filmmakers Capture Icebergs Melting Quickly
This researcher, James Balog has been charting the melting of glaciers for the past five years with a very sophisticated multi-point camera system. His research has found that the glaciers that are 2000 feet high are residing at the rate of 1/4 mile per year!
His findings are supportive of the news story issued recently that satellite analysis of the ice melt at the North Pole is so rapid that the North Polar region will be ice free by 2016.
He was asked to comment on the new $30 to $50 Billion proposed plan to protect and save New York City with a series of levees and twin 800 foot floodgates based upon smaller models used at New Orleans as well as a storm surge wetland area and storm surge barriers. (see photo). Response to elaborate plans such as these is that the ice is melting with a greater volume and faster rate than these stop gap measures could ever accommodate. Additionally, how many decades do you think it would take to construct these blue sky protective measures?
The times they are a changing . . . .
The footage is just one part of a new documentary called 'Chasing Ice,' by filmmaker James Balog, which was released in the U.K. and across the U.S. on Friday. An excerpt was published by The Guardian on Wednesday. The film documents in excruciating detail how the Greenland ice is melting due to climate change. Large glaciers are shown falling into the sea and rivers of melting ice.
"Satellite photography taken earlier this year showed that arctic sea ice shrank this summer to less than half what it was about four decades ago, reaching a record low in August 2012. The European Space Agency said, "The rate of loss is about 50 percent faster than previously forecast." Thanks to ESA.
Sightings in the United States
Alabama Video
WETUMPKA — I pulled in my driveway when a pop of light caught my attention coming into view over our residence at 10 PM, on March 6, 2013. I went inside for 15 minutes, and when I went outside again I saw a pulsating/strobbing just above the treetops. I watched it for a minute
and knew I needed to get my Sony Handy cam and began filming the object.
The object had become an "Orb" looking shape now and I filmed this for 20 minutes observing that the sky was full of twinkling stars but, on my LCD screen all I could observe was the object which made me believe that it was pretty close. I zoomed my recorder to 800X Digital Zoom and began reshooting the object. I also noticed there were now three, but difficult to get them on film. While filming my hearing was affected with a high pitched ringing tone and throughout the encounter I felt very safe and curiously loved. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Alaska Film
FAIRBANKS – On Father's Day my family decided to go out on the lawn and play crocket so I grabbed my camera to get some pictures and saw that the clouds looked different on June 6, 1995. I snapped a photo but never saw the UFO mother ship to the extent of the photo details. I did think the clouds did look strange but never gave it a thought. I was surprised to see not just one but two ships. I did not see the 2nd ship all lit up or exploding or whatever it is doing. This is the original photo that I scanned to up on the computer. I really did catch something out of this world. All my life I have been brought up to be opened minded, that there are angels and we can't be alone in the universe. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Arizona Moving Star
I thought it was a shooting star until it changed direction, brightness and distance on March 6, 2013. My neighbor saw it as well. Thanks to MUFON CMS
PEOPLES VALLEY– Little is known about this photo. It was sent by a friend of the photographer on March 9, 2013. The person who sent the photo is attempting to find out details of the photo. The photo is of low resolution and was likely taken with a cell phone and may be the photo a light pole or a reflection of a light pole off of the window glass.
Thanks to William Puckett,
Director http://www.UFOsnw.com
Arkansas UFO
LINCOLN – The witness reports that on March 10, 2013, going into church, a UFO flew over white house across street. Thanks to MUFON CMS
California Gray Orbs
EL DORADO HILLS — We went to Creekside Green's Park to have a nice lunch on March 1, 2013, at 12:45 PM. We noticed 30+ grayish seagulls flying really high in a large circle. Then we noticed some were shiny and reflected the sun and I realized those were not birds! Then in a blink of an eye they were gone. Perhaps ten birds were flying in different directions, but where did the birds go? We clearly saw some planes flying lower than the birds.
Then out of nowhere, we saw three planes flying in a triangle formation, with one plane leading in front of the formation and there were two others in a pair, for a total of five objects flying like a pentagram silently. They suddenly vanished. I figure a mother ship was right above us, and the seagulls might have gone behind or inside of it. As for the planes, I think they clearly were coming from the mother ship, which was invisible. Military fighters made several passes. Thanks to Peter Davenport, Director National UFO Reporting Center http://www.UFOcenter.com
SAN DIEGO — I was not aware that I had taken a photo of whatever this is until I posted the photos. The photo was taken from the 33rd floor of the Manchester Hyatt on March 2, 2013. It might be one of the planets that somehow were visible during the day. This photo was shot through glass, but the white object does not appear in any of the other photos I took within seconds of each other. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Connecticut Light
NEW HAVEN — I was bored one night and began flicking the back porch light on and off, when I notice what I thought was a satellite that looked like blue and orange sideways small hand weight. I went outside and it suddenly changed direction going backwards and stopping at the top middle of my house.
It transformed from a giant yellow ball with star like glistening qualities and a giant blue S right through it. It was a small Saturn disk the same color as the ball, also having blue tints. Then nearby there were two small red barbells. On either side. Note: This was Veterans Day but I don't think it matters because it was a serious UFO. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Florida Lights
DEBARY — My wife and I left our house at around 9 PM, on March 9, 2013, and went up our road and saw three red orange circles. They were coming down in a staggered positions then going up in the sky so we both left the bikes and ran across US 92 to get a better look. When the first three disappeared, three more red and orange r spheres came in silently.
I took some pictures and even had a guy stop his car and ask if I saw the last one go faint and disappear. We headed home and saw a huge "V shaped thing." A formation of UFOs had these orange circles that lit up, then stopped, and it turned towards the objects as their
lights went out. I could still see the triangle shape with a red light in middle. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Illinois Six Orange Lights
EDWARDSVILLE — At Dunlap Lake my friend and I viewed six suspended orbs of golden rod or orange in close proximity to each other on March 2, 2013 in the southeastern sky. Suddenly four of the lights disappeared at 9:55 PM. The two remaining lights continued to sit in formation for one minute. One by one they faded out of site. Thanks to Peter Davenport, Director National UFO Reporting Center http://www.UFOcenter.com
Michigan Husband and Wife's Close Encounter
SCOTTVILLE – My wife and I were playing cards in the parlor, when she asked, "What is that?" I looked out the window we watched what we both thought was seven snowmobiles on our farm on December 22, 2012. Then the lights rose up not too high, but slowly headed toward the house. The objects were getting close as viewed from our kitchen window at 2.03 AM.
The back yard is incredibly lit up as the silent object flew above our house and over our shed.
I moved away from the window due to being scared, and just like that, the light disappeared. My wife noticed 31 minutes had passed while I was in the kitchen. I could not believe it, because my wife and I figured I was in the kitchen for just a couple minutes.
My wife refuses to discuss what happened, why? This event haunts me, almost daily; and I swear to God, that this story is the absolute truth. NOTE: The above image is a rendering. Ken Pfeifer MUFON NJ www.worldufophotos.org
New York Drones
NEW YORK — A mystery in the sky over New York City on Monday got one commercial airline pilot's attention. The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating a report from the pilot who claimed he saw an unmanned or remote-controlled aircraft while on his final approach to John F. Kennedy International Airport.
The pilot, who was at the controls of Alitalia Flight AZA 60, a Boeing 777, spotted what may have been a drone about four to five miles southeast of the airport at an altitude of 1,500 feet while on final approach to Runway 31 Right at about 1:15 PM. The pilot is heard telling air traffic controllers on radio calls recorded by the website LiveATC.net, "We saw a drone, a drone aircraft."
But a man named Fyezil who drives an airport shuttle van told 1010 WINS' John Montone he often sees kids flying model aircrafts in the area.
"I see it many times," he said. "Sometimes, I see them flying so high."
The Alitalia flight was not forced to take evasive action and landed safely minutes later, officials said. Thanks to CBS
Note: Drones can carry cameras and be outfitted to look like a UFO.
My brother and I were out-front for 30 minutes watching a helicopter fly around with a spotlight , looking for someone who fired gun shots less than a mile away from my home, the helicopter eventually left the area completely, going south towards downtown BUFFALO, where it came from.
I looked up, and directly above me was a bright star like object moving slowly east.
I was trying to figure out what exactly is above me. It moved slowly and twitched like it was vibrating. I snapped a photo and it jetted north across the sky and stopped on a dime and vanished! Thanks to MUFON CMS
North Carolina Circles
MOREHEAD CITY — I received this photo from a friend in New Hanover County on January26, 2013. He stated he kept getting urges to go out and take some photos but it was overcast and he kind of shrugged it off, until the urges became so strong he got his camera and stepped outside and snapped a few photos this is what he caught. Thanks to Jim Sutton
Paranormal Research and Investigation Society, Morehead City NC 28570
CONOVER — At a carp pond in Catawba County off Claremont Road I noticed three orbs come towards the trees on March 9, 2013. It hovered over a mile above me. They looked like stars at dusk, some brighter than others. Some stayed stationary while some moved around. Some seemed to band together and some grouped with others that were a twinkly blue.
I first thought it was a possible balloon but several dozen appeared and were stationary. I was excited. They eventually went northwest and faded after I videoed and took pictures. About 20 minutes later a military C 17 aircraft flew in the distance. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Texas Disc
AUSTIN — I took three different photos on February 8, 2013, and some kind of light would always appear. I do not have a flash on my phone so took notice to it very quickly later on when looking at the photos I took. On this particular photo I was just admiring the brightness of the sun and just snapped a picture on my way to work. Later I noticed the red light above the building.
Note: The red light highlighted in the photo is a lens flare. However, a few other objects show up in the photos which are difficult to explain.
Perhaps these other objects could be blemishes are small breaks in the windshield of the car? Thanks to William Puckett, Director http://www.UFOsnw.com
Virginia White Lights on Unique Object
RICHMOND – I dropped my husband off and was returning home on the Richmond Airport Connector Road on March 1, 2013, when I saw what I thought was an airplane light to my right.
As I continued to watch the plane I knew it was not heading for the airport so I figured that it was a private jet. As I watched the object it stopped and a light was bright shining down. So now I figured that the object must be police and they were looking for something.
As I came up on the object, I noticed that it was an object that I had never seen. The object was round as a cylinder and hovering over the trees, the inside was hollow except for two cylinders that went thru the middle. Half way thru these two cylinders split and made a "V" shape. I was near the object for about a minute as it took off to the northeast.
((NUFORC Note: We spoke via telephone with this witness, and she seemed to us to be quite sincere. Her description of the object was so precise and objective; we suspect that she is a very good witness. PD)) Thanks to Peter Davenport, Director National UFO Reporting Center http://www.UFOcenter.com
Washington Triangle
COVINGTON – On March 4, 2013, at 1:17 AM, there was something due east that caught my attention high in the sky. It looked different with three
red lights relatively close together. The edges of the structure were noticeable, and I saw a black triangle with red lights at each inside corner. It had a very faint glow from the widest edge of the structure. The lights had a very slow strobe action, but didn't change color; they would just turn a brighter color red for a split second, and then a steady duller red for about 10 to 15 seconds.
The lights did not chase each other like Christmas lights can. The strobbing of them was random. The triangular object was stationary and I noticed an extremely bright light like a laser. It was a white pinpoint of light moving toward the triangle. It disappeared either into the triangle or passed above it. The pinpoint did not come out the other side of the triangle. I got a strange feeling and moved back into the building, shut the door and locked it. Thanks to William Puckett, Director http://www.UFOsnw.com
EVERETT — I was looking out the window on March 9, 2013, when I noticed an object that appeared to be moving closer and closer. I thought it might be a helicopter but was casting a myriad of colors and changing shape and size. I grabbed my Nikon and shot a few photos.
I zoomed in and to my surprise I had captured these colored photos.
Thanks to MUFON CMS
Worldwide Sightings
Australia UFO
SYDNEY – Looking east over the slightly cloudy ocean around 9:45 PM, on March 8, 2013, when all of a sudden a really large flash of lighting came down in a straight line towards the ocean. Lighting flashes were emitting around the shape of the UFO, at the same time. It was about five miles up in the night sky so I could observe that it was very big about five times bigger than any 747 aircraft. I was amazed that it was very electrical in ativity. Then after a few seconds I did not see anything again like it had disappeared. This undoubtedly will remain in my thoughts and memory for the rest of my life. Thanks to MUFON CMS
WAGGA WAGGA — UFO craft was seen which was very bright like a star, but much bigger, and had no aviation lights that flashed. I witnessed it, but after a while it just disappeared like turning off a light switch. A minute later a comet fell a few miles back from the craft's path of travel. I observed it traveling south at a steady speed and did not vary in luminosity or shape. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Canada Two Bright Orange Pulsing Lights
VERNON, BC — I was relaxing listening to music with my two buddies and looked out the window towards Okanagan Lake, when I spotted two lights in the sky 100 meters away from each other on March 1, 2013. The two lights were orange and were growing brighter and dimmer, almost like a flickering fire in the distance at 9:30 PM. The lights hovered slowly through the valley rotating end over end and staying the same distance away from each other.
I went outside to see if I could hear helicopter blades, but there was no noise. The object or objects would move and rotate and for about 30 seconds it just stayed stationary. We watched in awe as we discussed the possibilities of a UFO sighting, and all agreed it wasn't normal. The lights continued down the valley no faster than a helicopter and no higher than the valley mountain tops until one light went out. Then 20 seconds later the second one followed. Thanks to Peter Davenport, Director National UFO Reporting Center http://www.UFOcenter.com
India Bright Cylindrical Silent Object
VARANASI — My son and I were on the roof of our house when we saw a hovering bright cylindrical object on March 1, 2013, at 6 PM. My son pointed out the silent hovering cylindrical object that had no wings, left no trail, if it were a rocket. It was bright and shiny and quickly changed its path while maintaining the same direction. I am very sure it wasn't a conventional craft. It could be a manned/unmanned alien object just commencing its surveillance voyage before sunset. Thanks to Peter Davenport, Director National UFO Reporting Center http://www.UFOcenter.com
German Disc
FREIBURG — A silver disc appeared on January 2nd 2013 at 1:21 PM that flew in a straight line to south. Sometimes it disappeared behind some clouds, but re-appeared after some seconds. It was very slow in the beginning, but then speeded up and disappeared behind the clouds. In the first 20 seconds it flew very slowly, but then it speeded up faster than a plane. I think it was 50 to 100 feet in diameter. One witness saw it clearly with me with identical observations. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Mexico Oval
SAN CARLOS — On the beach I saw a flat oval shaped bright shiny UFO high in the sky which hovered, turned and disappeared after 90 seconds on February 7, 2013, at 10:30 AM. My friend and I were sitting on the beach and he asked, "What is that up there?" I looked and we both saw a shiny object that was like a flat oval hovering just under the sun's rays. We watched for a minute or more and told my friend's husband to look. He stood up to look and the object made a dip to the left and went straight up and disappeared. My friend practices law and I am a real estate agent. There was no plausible explanation for what we saw other than it was an unidentified flying object. Thanks to Peter Davenport, Director National UFO Reporting Center http://www.UFOcenter.com
New Zealand Shape Light
AUCKLAND — Two units of orange to red in color both within 30 seconds both went vertical on March 1, 2013, at 7:45 PM, for 25 seconds. Thanks to Peter Davenport, Director National UFO Reporting Center http://www.UFOcenter.com
South Africa Flying Object
CAPE TOWN, PAROW EAST – On March 10, 2013, my Mother called us to witness a strange object in the sky at 8:45 PM. At first we didn't see it, but then we saw it appear and disappear at a different location in the night sky. It had one light in the middle and others in a half circle around it, flashing at an extremely high altitude. It would flash and disappear and would appear a great distance from its original place. Even weirder was three star like lights heading south after one another at a high speed heading in the same direction. This was sighted by my Mother, brother, sister, fiancé and I. Thanks to Will Mode.
Sweden Equilateral Orange Light Triangle
Three orange lights were seen moving slowly west about one kilometer high in sky and two kilometers from our location on February 18, 2013 at 10 PM. It pivoted slowly to reveal a perfect equilateral shape and flew southwest silently at a hot air balloon speed. Its lights were about 200 meters apart and did not change distance. Light intensity was very deep orange, significantly larger than warning lights on cell phones towers. After one minute, an additional orange light rose from the northeast with about one kilometer from the triangle object. The light was slightly larger than the lights on the triangle.
It followed the triangle at the same speed and flowed as if it could be a balloon. However after rising first about two kilometers over the hill, it sank to an altitude of 500 meters for a final altitude about one kilometer. It then proceeded to follow the triangle southeast until both were out of sight. The time was about 2145 GMT +1. Thanks to Peter Davenport, Director National UFO Reporting Center http://www.UFOcenter.com
United Kingdom Sightings
53.383159N -1.476394 E — I was out walking and saw people taking pictures and looked up and saw three big orange lights moving across the sky silently on February 18, 2013, at 9 PM. I saw three lights and a few minutes another set of lights appeared. They clearly had the shape of a triangle although two of the lights got closer to one another at one point. After four minutes, two lights of the first triangle faded away then so did the third one. And a couple of minutes later, the exact thing happened to the other triangle. It was really weird; the orange color was like a fire, actually. I wish I'd had been able to take some pictures, but I had run out of battery. Thanks to MUFON CMS
OSWESTRY — At the time of the event I was doing vocal preparation when my dog barked franticly at the window on February 15, 2013, and ran to the front door as if he had seen something. I got up and checked and saw nothing. My girlfriend came down complaining that she heard a rumbling noise out the bathroom window. We saw an extremely bright light outside the window that lit up our garden. We both ran to the back door and looked out, as the dog hysterically barked outside. We saw a weirdly shaped dark object hovering over the top of the street ascending higher. My phone stopped working. I haven't seen or heard of any kind of aircraft like it in my life as I used to be in the air force. It suddenly shot off at shocking speed. Within the hour our phone started to work again, and we received calls from two people down the street who had seen the same thing.
Our dog had disappeared and we searched, but he came home by himself the next day about 4 PM, and seemed depressed and made no noise. The dog's tail had been burned. My voice seems higher as well. Thanks to MUFON CMS
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The Nigeria Governors' Forum (NGF) on Wednesday night met in Abuja to discuss issues of minimum wage, insecurity and other matters of interests for the development of the country.
While the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) is proposing a minimum wage of N65,000 for workers, the governors have been insisting on the staggering of the implementation of the new wage, if approved.
Also on the meeting agenda was discussion on the issue of insecurity, especially the killings in Jos.
The governors were also expected to meet with the Postmaster-General of the Nigerian Postal Service and the Attorneys General from 36 states of the federation on the contentious issue of Stamp duty.
Part of the agenda was to discuss the face up between the executive and legislative arms of government.
Meanwhile, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) expected to make representation on the actual oil revenue generation and remittance from the corporation, did not come.
The Nigerian Communication Commission (NCC) was also expected to make presentation to the governors. (NAN)


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Brendan Steele will open the newly-formatted PGA Tour season this week when he competes in the $5 million dollar Frys.com Open at the CordeValle Golf Club in San Martin, Calif., Oct. 10 to 13. The winner will earn $900,000 and 500 FedExCup points.
This is the first PGA Tour season to begin before the New Year; it is officially designated the 2013-14 season.
Steele plans to get an early jump on earning FedExCup points in his fourth year on the PGA Tour by competing in four official PGA Tour events before the holidays.
Generally, a total of about 350 to 400 FedExCup points for a season will place a player within the top 125 golfers earning PGA Tour playing rights for the following season.
Later this month, Steele plans to enter the Shriners Hospitals for Children Open in Las Vegas, and the CIMB Classic in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. In November, he will tee up at the OHL Classic at Mayakoba in Playa del Carmen, Mexico.


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Alan Jackson vs. High Valley – The Showdown
Fans responded passionately to Alan Jackson's new single, 'You Go Your Way,' yesterday and last night in the Taste of Country Nights Showdown. The song easily ousted 'Ex-Old Man' by Kristen Kelly, meaning the country legend will move on to face a new challenger. Today, that's another act new to American country music fans.
After building a strong fanbase in Canada, High Valley has stormed Nashville hoping to find similar success. The sibling trio — led by Brad Rempel — released 'Love You for a Long Time' to radio this month. The mid-tempo love song is easy to enjoy and easy to find yourself humming along to after just a few listens. They'll need full support from fans around the world to knock off the one-day champion, however.
Listen to clips of both Jackson's and High Valley's songs and vote for your favorite here. You can vote once every hour online, so come back and vote often to be sure your artist wins. Hear the full versions of the songs tonight after 10PM on Taste of Country Nights. Help your favorite song win by placing additional votes at (888) 678-9995. Call as many times as you like! You can listen to the show online through any of the 33 radio stations that carry it. Voting will end tonight at 10:40PM CT.
Listen to a Sample of Alan Jackson, 'You Go Your Way'
Listen to a Sample of High Valley, 'Love You for a Long Time'
Showdown Rules: The song with the most votes wins, and the winner goes on to face a new challenger in the next Showdown. Vote as much as once per hour online, and as much as you want by calling (888) 678-9995. If a song wins five days in a row, it will be retired into the Taste of Country Showdown Hall of Fame to allow for new songs to compete. Some songs will be considered for a second Showdown if voter turnout is healthy in a losing effort.


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I have asked a design company for a quote for a website design. They have asked me if I would like the graphics in PSD format or cut up graphics.
I am assuming that the PSD format is an image of a whole page (i.e. a mockup/design) and the cut-up graphics will be images for each graphic (icons, buttons, etc.).
Is my assumption correct? Which would be better? I need site designs (for the unique pages) plus all of the relevant artwork (icons, etc. - note I will do the menus in CSS). So should I ask for PSD's of the pages plus 'cut up graphics' where relevant?